Workshop participants to be deported for visa violation

Apriadi Gunawan, The Jakarta Post/Medan

After seven hours of questioning, four foreigners participating in a trauma counseling workshop in Medan will soon be deported for visa violations. Syarief O. Ahimsa, the chief of Medan Polonia Immigration Office, said on Friday that they would be deported on Saturday through Polonia Airport.

The four ill-fated foreigners are Dabhidiwala Meryam, Mitraraja Kanti, both Indian nationals, Setungga Mudalige Philip, a Sri Lankan national and Dauncey Rebecca Fay, a British national.

Dabhidiwala and Setungga attended the workshop in their capacity as representatives of the Asian Human Rights Commission, Mitraraja is a trauma expert invited by the workshop's organizer the North Sumatra Commission for Missing Persons and Victims of Violence (Kontras) and Dauncey is a relief worker who has been living in Aceh for a long time. Dauncey was a workshop participant.

According to Syarief, the four had violated an immigration law as they only held a tourist visa.

As holders of a tourist visa, the four should not have attended a workshop on trauma counseling for tsunami victims, but they had violated the visa use, said Syarief.

"If they had wished to attend a seminar, they should have used a seminar visa that would allow them to attend the seminar," said Syarief. "They have to leave the country by Saturday, and if they do not, then they will be forcibly deported," said Syarief.

According to Syarief, besides the visa violation, the four were to be deported on suspicions that they were involved or had contact with members of the rebel Free Aceh Movement (GAM).

"We received information that they had connection with GAM from the Indonesian Military intelligence," said Syarief.

The intelligence information was also the basis for the police to raid the workshop on Thursday and for calling it off. The workshop, held in Sumatra Village, Medan, was actually set to wind down on Saturday.

North Sumatra Kontras' Chief of Internal Affairs, Wina Khairina, expressed concern over the deportation. Earlier, similar thoughts were aired by another activist Otto Syamsuddin Ishak, who said that the action reminded him of the time of Soeharto's New Order dictatorship when people were not free to gather and express their views.

During an interview on Friday, Wina also refuted charges that some participants had links with GAM. She asserted that all participants were concerned with trauma rehabilitation in the post-tsunami disaster in Aceh.

She confirmed that some of the 24 participants were Acehnese but none of them had links with GAM.

The incident began on Thursday when police personnel raided the workshop and later held the four foreigners. A senior police officer earlier argued that the raid was held because the workshop committee had not reported the planned workshop to the police.

Similar raids were common during iron-fist regime of Soeharto, but have rarely happened after the reform movement that took place in 1998. The reform movement was marked by several laws that assured freedom of expression. The law says, among other things, that people are free to gather as long as they report the gathering to the police.